About Those New CrunchPad Pictures — A little background for those of you who haven't heard of the CrunchPad: This is the post that kicked off the project. I wanted something I couldn't buy, and found people who said it could be built for a lot less than I imagined.

How to Block the DiggBar — Last week Digg released something they call the DiggBar, which serves as both a new interface for Digg and doubles as a URL shortening service. The way it works is that you just add “digg.com/” at the beginning of any URL, and Digg creates a short URL in the form of digg.com/1234.

Google and Digg's Secret Backroom Deal — Over the last couple of months, I've been getting the urge to get back into blogging a bit. However, when it's been awhile since you've attempted to construct a thought longer than a 140 character tweet, actually doing it is a bit harder than you regular bloggers might imagine.

AT&T uses Twitter during service outage — Want to find out why you suddenly don't have Internet access or cell phone service? You might want to check out the social-networking site Twitter. — It seems that Twitter was one of the main ways that phone company AT&T has been communicating …

Destroy the Internet with a hacksaw? — This morning many people in Silicon Valley woke up without 911 service, Internet, cellular phones, and in some cases TV. Web sites were impacted and Internet traffic between a few major datacenters stopped flowing. Several of our employees were cut off from the Internet and phone service.

Time for an audit of Microsoft's ‘Apple Tax’ — Microsoft puts forth a ‘tax return’ showing the cost difference between a Windows PC or Mac purchase. However, CNET News' Ina Fried suggests auditors take a close look at the itemized deductions. — Microsoft is back touting the “Apple Tax” …

New Laptop Hunters ad proves Macs are just for children — Microsoft's latest installment in its popular series of ripped-from-the-headlines, “real America” style 'puter-buying adventures follows a mom and son duo — Lisa and Jackson. We learn during the commercial that the two need a computer which is …

New in Labs: Inserting images — Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on “Inserting images” from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new toolbar icon like this:

Time Warner's Unlimited Bandwidth Plan: $150 a Month — Time Warner Cable has modestly softened its proposal to impose bandwidth limits on all of its broadband data customers. Landel Hobbs, the company's chief operating officer, has just published a post with the new price tiers for a test of the plan it will conduct in four cities.

CompUSA Comes Back From the Dead — About three months ago, Loretta Alkalay, a retired Florida resident, wanted to get a new HDTV. So she decided to give the CompUSA near her home a try. — Yes, CompUSA. The once-bankrupt electronics retailer is making a comeback …

What if Oracle bought Sun Microsystems? — If Oracle picks up where IBM left off, database, storage, and Java customers could be in for radical changes — So much for that. According to reports, Sun Microsystems has rejected IBM's buyout offer, apparently preferring to stick to the dogma …

Emerging battlefield: Browser installers — Chicago (IL) - Mozilla was surprised to discover that, every day, 50,000 people do not install Firefox after a successful software download. At the same time, Safari and Chrome leverage installers to their own advantage in a very efficient way.

Sex, Lies, and Software Development — Are there any programming jobs you wouldn't take? Not because the jobs didn't pay enough, had poor benefits, or limited upside — but because the work itself made you uncomfortable? Consider the tale of one freshmeat.net writer: … That was eight years ago.

Network storage still not consumer-friendly — Network-attached storage (NAS) has been on the verge of breaking through into the mainstream consumer space for quite a few years. — The idea is deceptively simple - plug a hard drive into your network (that is, into your router) …

The neverending story — Last night the Kido (aka Conficker/ Downadup) botnet kicked into action - what everyone's been on the lookout for since 1st April. — The computers infected with Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Kido (aka Conficker.c) contacted each other over P2P, telling infected machines to download new malicious files.

How to trend swear words in the Guardian — Future Platforms MD Tom Hume trended profanity in the Guardian using the Content API. “Being the kind of childish individual who still gets kicks out of looking rude words up in the dictionary, I decided to use the API to examine changes in obscenity in the last 10 years.”

Is Microsoft Turning Away From Commodity Servers? — This week's news of a chip designer leaving Sun to work for Microsoft could be a sign that the Redmond giant is trying to build a closer relationship between its software and others' hardware as a way to boost performance of applications and use the underlying chips more efficiently.